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Chocolate Squares
Beat three eggs in one cup of sugar, one teaspoonful each of allspice, cloves, cinnamon; two tablespoonfuls chocolate, teaspoonful vanilla; cup flour with one teaspoonful baking powder and lastly a good supply of chopped nuts and raisins and two tablespoons of whiskey. Mix thoroughly and bake in a large pan half inch thick in moderate oven. Frost with following frosting: Half cup of powdered sugar and one tablespoon of boiling water, mix until smooth and put on cake.
Cut in squares when cool, but not cold.
A thin spiced chocolate bar cake, close in construction to an early brownie: no butter or milk, just eggs beaten with sugar for structure. A few points need pinning down before you start.
- Moderate ovenRead this as somewhere in the 350-375F range. At half an inch thick the sheet bakes fast — check at 15 minutes and expect 18-22 total. Overbaking is the main failure here, since there is no added fat to keep it moist.
- The pan"A large pan" with the batter half an inch deep points to something around a 9x13 sheet pan, though the recipe does not say. One cup of flour makes a modest amount of batter, so a smaller pan may be needed to reach half an inch; spread with an offset spatula rather than tilting.
- Two tablespoons chocolateAmbiguous in the original. Unsweetened cocoa is the likelier reading for a 1900s bar of this type and gives a drier, spicier crumb; two tablespoons of grated unsweetened baking chocolate also works and tastes richer. Either way it is a modest amount of chocolate — this is a spice cake with chocolate in it.
- No fat, by designDo not "fix" the recipe by adding butter. With no butter or milk, the eggs beaten thoroughly into the sugar do much of the lifting and tenderizing, with the baking powder alongside. Beat until the mixture is pale and thick before anything else goes in.
- The spices are assertiveA teaspoon each of allspice, cloves and cinnamon against one cup of flour is a lot by current habits. Halving the cloves in particular is reasonable if you want the chocolate to register.
- WhiskeyTwo tablespoons, added last, mostly for aroma and to keep the crumb soft. Rye or bourbon suits the spices. It can be left out with no structural consequence.
- The glazeHalf a cup of powdered sugar with a tablespoon of boiling water makes a very thin water icing that sets to a matte shell. Add the water a few drops at a time — a full tablespoon may be more than the sugar can carry, depending on how it is packed.
- Cut warm, not coldThe instruction to cut "when cool, but not cold" is the hinge. Once fully cold this eggy, low-fat sheet turns firm and the set glaze shatters into flakes. Cut while still slightly warm to the hand, with a long thin blade.
- YieldCut into roughly 1.5-inch squares, a 9x13 sheet would give something like 45-50 small squares, fewer from a smaller pan — intended as a tea or company sweet, not dessert portions.
"Bride's cook books" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a distinct commercial and community genre: collections aimed at the new householder, often compiled by a church group, a women's club or a local newspaper, with recipes credited to contributors. Their cake sections tell you what a hostess was expected to have on hand at short notice, and thin sheet cakes cut into squares are all over them because they bake quickly, keep a few days, and stretch a single cup of flour a long way. This one sits at an interesting moment: chocolate is present but subordinate to the older spice-cake palette of allspice, cloves and cinnamon, and there is no butter at all. Fudgy, butter-heavy brownies are generally traced to the first decade of the twentieth century and spread through printed collections over the following years; recipes like this show the transition in progress, a spiced nut-and-raisin bar that has picked up cocoa without yet reorganizing itself around it. The two tablespoons of whiskey are unremarkable for the period and served as flavouring and keeping agent.